The Old City is the walled Jerusalem space where the narrator’s private crisis intersects with the city’s religious, ethnic, and political divisions. Entered through Damascus Gate and divided into Arab and Christian quarters, it is at once a lived urban environment, a site of commercial exchange, a place of pilgrimage, and a symbolic map of the conflicts that shape the novel. The narrator’s movements through it repeatedly expose the distance between official warnings, inherited memories, and the unstable experience of actually crossing its streets.

Setting and Divided Access

The narrator reaches the Old City after passing through Wadi Joz, an Arab neighborhood marked by car-repair shops, broken vehicles, damaged sidewalks, loose tires, and broken glass. A brief encounter with a Palestinian boy changes the emotional temperature of the journey: the boy shouts in Arabic, but what might have been an insult or threat turns out to be a request concerning a soccer ball, which the narrator kicks back to him. The small exchange does not erase the surrounding divisions, but it interrupts the narrator’s assumption that every unfamiliar gesture carries hostility.

Damascus Gate provides the principal threshold into the city. The narrator describes it as crowded with Palestinian men in dark jeans and T-shirts, veiled women in black robes, older men wearing kaffiyehs and using canes, and foreign tourists carrying cameras and backpacks. The crowd physically carries him through the gate, making entry less an act of individual choice than an experience of being absorbed into a collective flow. Once inside, he takes a right-hand fork into the Arab market, where movement is guided by crowds, shopkeepers, stalls, and branching streets rather than by any stable sense of orientation.

The narrator’s educational program had discouraged students from visiting the Arab quarter alone, especially after three recent attacks against Jews in the Old City—two involving knives and one involving a bullet that narrowly missed an American rabbi traveling to the Kotel. Earlier visits had been made with Michal, who moved through the alleys without fear. Alone, however, the narrator experiences an unsettling reversal: surrounded by shoppers, tourists, and merchants, he feels no immediate fear, yet his emotional despair makes injury seem like a fitting conclusion to his shattered life. The Old City therefore functions both as a supposedly dangerous location and as a space into which the narrator projects his own wish for punishment or disappearance.

Markets, Quarters, and Memory

The Arab market is rendered through successive sensory and commercial zones. The narrator moves past fruit and vegetable stalls, leather goods, butchered calves, smoky cafes, and olive-wood crafts. Women in multicolored robes carry trays of pita, boys strike donkeys, and men in suits, jeans, white robes, and kaffiyehs hurry to work among a reduced number of European and American tourists. The decline in tourism is connected to the Intifada, which has evidently damaged local business; political violence appears not only in attacks and warnings but also in the altered scale of commerce.

Smell becomes the narrator’s means of recovering a route he has not traveled for twenty-two years. Donkey dung, mint tea, leather, and tobacco from water pipes form what he calls an olfactory guide, leading him through the market more reliably than a map. As he crosses into the Christian Quarter, the merchandise changes from predominantly Arab-market goods to crosses, fish necklaces, and New Testaments in multiple languages. The transition demonstrates how the city’s religious divisions are materially displayed through objects for sale, even as the market itself joins the quarters through continuous pedestrian movement.

The remembered destination is Rafik’s Boutique, still described as the largest shop in the souk. The narrator recalls reaching it by taking the first right fork after Damascus Gate and passing the successive stalls. In July 2005, Rafik greets him at the entrance and appears almost identical to the man remembered from the past, except for gray hair and a salt-and-pepper beard. The encounter turns the Old City into an archive of bodily change: the route survives in memory, the shop remains recognizable, and yet the people who inhabit the remembered space have aged.

Religious and Political Space

The Old City is also connected to the novel’s wider geography of contested borders. The narrator’s walk toward it follows an encounter with Wadi Joz and leads through Damascus Gate into the Arab market, while other episodes place Jewish neighborhoods, the Lerner home, West Bank settlements, refugee communities, and Israeli political institutions within the same narrative field. The city’s spatial arrangement repeatedly asks who may enter, who is warned away, who moves confidently, and whose history is treated as the background to another group’s pilgrimage.

The place is inseparable from Jewish religious life. The narrator recalls the danger faced by a rabbi traveling to pray at the Kotel, and his route eventually reaches the Christian Quarter, where a church with a giant crucifix stands beyond the market. He feels faint and thirsty near the church and briefly imagines asking a priest for water before recognizing the shop associated with Michal and with Zehava’s desire to accompany Michal while she looked for a wedding dress. Religious destinations, commercial displays, thirst, and romantic loss converge in a single sequence, turning the Old City into a landscape where sacred associations are continually crossed by bodily need and personal disappointment.

The same spatial tensions extend beyond the city walls. Chaim Lerner’s political work takes him to Pisgat David, a West Bank settlement whose suburban houses and lawns surprise the narrator, and later peace talks reveal that Pisgat David would fall on the Palestinian side of proposed territorial maps. The Old City is not isolated from these disputes: its gates and quarters belong to the same system of borders, competing claims, and unequal mobility. The later realization that the settlement’s location would be contested in both negotiating positions makes the narrator wonder what Chaim would have thought, linking the dead scholar’s political imagination to the geography through which the narrator has moved.

Narrative Significance

The Old City’s importance lies in its refusal to remain a mere backdrop. Its streets provide the narrator with a route through overlapping histories: Palestinian displacement associated with the Nakba, Jewish pilgrimage and vulnerability, Christian symbols, the Intifada’s economic consequences, and the personal memories attached to Michal and Zehava. The market is crowded and ordinary, but every turn also carries political and religious meaning; the city’s apparent continuity conceals histories that remain violently unresolved.

For the narrator, walking alone through the Old City is an act of estrangement and self-displacement. He feels unable to belong among haredi families, secular Israeli men, or Palestinians, and his passage through the gate becomes a physical expression of that unsettled identity. Yet the soccer ball, the remembered smells, and Rafik’s recognition complicate his alienation. Contact remains possible, but it is fragile, dependent on gestures, memory, translation, and the willingness to cross a boundary without pretending that the boundary has disappeared.

The Old City therefore condenses the novel’s larger concern with borders that are simultaneously concrete and imagined. Gates regulate passage, quarters organize religious identity, warnings turn streets into zones of suspicion, and remembered routes preserve relationships that history and separation have altered. The narrator can cross from Wadi Joz through Damascus Gate and into the Christian Quarter, but physical passage does not produce political reconciliation or emotional release. Instead, the Old City makes visible the book’s central paradox: proximity brings the conflicting communities into contact, while the very structures that permit contact keep their histories, loyalties, and losses sharply apart.